The life of John Flemwell, buried in the north-east section of Heene Cemetery has been beautifully written up by one of our researchers. John married in 1935. By the time he and his wife Mary moved to Worthing (sometime between 1891 and 1900), the couple had had three children.
One of them, George Jackson Flemwell (born in Mitcham, Surrey in 1865), apparently suffered from ill health and went to live in Switzerland, a country he was later to adopt.
George became a botanist and illustrator who wrote two books on the Alpine flowers of Switzerland: The Flower Fields of Alpine Switzerland and Alpine Flowers and Gardens. The latter volume — a copy of which I was lucky to find on eBay — was published in 1910 by A & C Black of London. It is a handsome volume “painted and described” by the author and dedicated to his mother, Mary.
Perhaps with Browning’s “Oh, to be in England now that April’s there” tugging at his heart, George Flemwell saw in the flowers of his adopted country something that he might have seen in England, even in Worthing. As well as containing paintings of true Alpine flowers, the book contains ones of Marsh Marigolds, Primulas and Thistles and an abundance of hay meadow flowers, some of which would also have been native to his country of birth. The Alpine Spring he enjoys is, in his own words, “the dreamer’s season par excellence”. “In this canton,” he wrote, “the flowers of every European climate are represented.”
The paintings, in a quintessentially Edwardian style, are timeless celebrations of floral abundance and the text accompanying them, demonstrating the author’s wide reading and certain botanical knowledge, rings with a love of nature. Alpine Flowers and Gardens is dense with the common names of flowers and birds. There are Crocuses, Dandelion, Alpine versions of Forget-me-not and Buttercup, Hawthorn, Primroses, Bluebells, Primulas, Violets, Stinging Nettle, Dock, Coltsfoot and Foxgloves.
In a chapter entitled Summer in the Alps, Flemwell takes the reader on an Alpine ascent through recently-cut hay meadows, across the slopes above, through to the forest, then on and up above the tree line, all the while noting the array of flowering summer plants. Butterflies are abundant, Blues, Coppers and Yellows. A Great Copper, he notes, now extinct in England, might be restored “by the good offices of Wicken Fen” (the first English nature reserve cared for by the National Trust); and a Swallowtail, then common throughout Switzerland, he observes is “likely to benefit by the establishment of Wicken Fen as a preserve”. (Sadly the Great Copper remained extinct in the British Isles, although the Swallowtail hangs on today as one of Britain’s rarest butterflies.) As one would expect of an expat, thoughts of home may reduce to a trickle yet never completely dry up.
Intriguingly, judging from the text of Alpine Flowers and Gardens, Flemwell was greatly preoccupied by what we’d think of as environmental concerns. In a chapter on The Abuse and the Protection of Alpines, he writes:
In short, and in a time-worn phrase, man has upset the balance of Nature. And all his efforts to restore this balance only bring him fresh problems to solve, and lead him deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine ways of cause and effect and the maze-like mysteries of the unity of all things.
He gives instances of the day: the introduction of rabbits, the planting of water hyacinth, the extermination of hawks and stoats, rumours of the impact of wireless telegraphy on the weather, the impact of flying on birds and beasts, destruction of forests, mountain slope erosion and, centrally to this botanist, the ‘extermination’ of mountain flowers. What would these anxieties of 1910 have as their modern day equivalents? The list would be — and surely is — shockingly longer. (These Alpine scenes today would certainly show less snow and ice in summer.)
Driving his point home, he quoted a Spanish motto used in a report by the Swiss Association pour la Protection des Plantes:
If you wish to understand the importance of plants, imagine a world without them, and the comparison will alarm you, because the idea of death will at once present itself.
On guard against accusations of being ‘high-flown’, Flemwell ruminated on the significance of flowers — as the epitome of youth and vitality, as ever susceptible to decay and death, as emblems of a fault-line lying across the path of Man’s technical progress — and all this well in advance of the environmental and ecological crises that we face today. “Goddess Flora,” he wrote, “sits firmly and effectively enthroned within our lives”, before going to quote Ruskin as being right when he said that, “flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity”.
George Flemwell’s father’s grave in Heene Cemetery may have no Alpine flowers to decorate it. In Spring, the Forget-me-nots and Herb Roberts that flourish there will be followed with a rising and falling seasonal succession of different British wild flowers, many of which will support bees, butterflies and moths. Naturally self-seeded and carefully nurtured by volunteers, these fragile blooms speak to us in a universal and timeless register. How much better is this than a close-cropped and uniform turf or a bed of sterile stone chippings?
As deftly quoted in the biography written on this website of George Flemwell, under the entry for his father John, his own words provide the answer to that question:
At no time in human history have the uplifting qualities of alpine scenery been more precious than nowadays, as a set-off to the Tango, the Fox-trot, and other aberrations. Wild life can play its part as never before; the world stands grievously in need of such clean beauty.
Written by Rob Tomlinson